1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to an aperture diaphragm for lithography apparatus comprising a line-shaped multi-hole structure and blanking electrodes for generating a plurality of individually blankable particle beam probes.
2. Description of the Prior Art
An article in IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, Volume ED-26, No. 4, April 1979, at pages 663 through 674 and particularly FIG. 4 discloses an aperture diagram of the prior art. In this article, the blanking electrodes are composed of pairs of plates which are mounted at the side edges of the recesses of the multi-hole structures and these plate pairs are charged with blanking voltages via coaxial lines so that the particle beam probes which pass through the recesses will be laterally deflected in the direction toward a blanking diaphragm by means of the electrostatic fields between the pairs of plates. Such aperture diaphragm however, comprises an extremely complicated structure and is very costly since the cost increases with the number of recesses and, thus, a structure for a large number of particle beam probes becomes very expensive.